Ports, Pings and stuff

[David Smith]

Hi all.

This forum very helpfully sorted me out once before. Here I am again looking for help please. I've played C&C through the cncnet site for many years, mostly without any problems., but now I have one once more...

Virgin Media recently upgraded me from 100MB broadband to 200MB for free. Thanks very much! This also meant swapping our router for the latest Superhub 3. I called them up and a helpful lady opened ports 8054 on UDP and 50000 on Both; so I assumed I would be all singing all dancing for future games. I did a port test and confirmed I could play and host fast games. Sorted. Or so I thought.

My pings, when I had 100MB broadband were previously around the 10 to 15 range. I did a ping test expecting to see them halved. instead I now get numbers around 25 - 35 with one of the four pings much, much higher. I know that's not good. I called Virgin Media again. This time a chap reset the hub to factory setting then reapplied the 8054 and 50000 open port rules.

Back into C&C only to find 'porttest' advises my ports are now closed and my pings are still too high.

I'm not very techno but after ages mucking about I have worked out how to open the ports myself so have double checked they are open. I have also got into my Firewall and added cncnet as an allowed site.

What else can I do? It's most frustrating to know that my ports were open before Virgin Media got involved for the second time. And it's even more frustrating to know I had excellent pings on half the broadband speed I have now.

Virgin Media are visiting next week. Until then can anyone help please? (I have a pretty fast PC running Windows 7 by the way). Hope that's enough info.

Cheers,

David

 

[FunkyFr3sh]

Pings can become a bit higher when they increase your connection speed, that's because they're using new techniques to send more data through the same old physical lines. I don't really know much about cable connections but on DSL for example theres something called "interleaving" which is some kind of error correction they were forced to enable to make higher speeds possible. My ping also went from 6ms to 18ms when I upgraded my connection, there's nothing you can do about that

I guess that one bad ping might have just been bad luck, try some more pings and keep an eye on it. If all are below 50 then you're good to go, this wont be any problem

[David Smith]

Hi Funky, thanks for that information (   so far :-)  )

On the ports question: I have just reconnected my 'old' computer as a test and it reports ports are OPEN!

Now reconnected to my new PC again and ports are reported as CLOSED!

What's going on with that?

I have Virgin Media out on Tuesday afternoon by the way

Cheers mate,

David

[FunkyFr3sh]

On 12/10/2017 at 6:40 PM, David Smith said:

Hi Funky, thanks for that information (   so far :-)  )

On the ports question: I have just reconnected my 'old' computer as a test and it reports ports are OPEN!

Now reconnected to my new PC again and ports are reported as CLOSED!

What's going on with that?

I have Virgin Media out on Tuesday afternoon by the way

Cheers mate,

David

Each computer needs its own port forwarding settings, you probably forwarded it to the old computer only.

If you want both forwarded then you need to go into Settings->CnCNet->Game Settings and change your port to something else on the new computer, e.g. 8055 (old pc keeps 8054)

Then log in to your router and forward 8055 to your new pc and keep the old pc forwarded to 8054

 

But TBH, you don't really need to forward any ports, it will work fine without that too

[Myg]

Last I checked, the upnp system was enabled by default on the modern virgin media routers. That might be a good place to start.

[David Smith]

Again thanks Funky and Myg.

Well, Virgin media came round and swapped the new Super Hub3 for another even newer Super Hub3... however, same result as before for pings on the C&C games site I'm afraid; pings of 20 - 30 with an occasional high one too.

The engineer did over a dozen speed checks using the Ookla site. Each one returned low pings of between 6 -and12, download speeds of 220MB and upload of around 12 -15MB, proving the Virgin router works fine.

Again port 8064 advises it's open in the router but C&C still says it's closed. (If I try to open 8055 it says the range 8054 is already open.)

I do appear to be able to join fast (lightening bolt games) as I've not been blocked. I'm unsure what games I host myself!

All in all it looks like wherever I am now, I'm staying here. So, thanks for the help and advice chaps. If you have any further ideas please let me know, I'm still keen to get things back to how they used to be!

Cheers,

David